With Hope and Imagination: Imaginative Moral Decision-Making in Neonatal Intensive Care Units

Although the role of imagination in moral reasoning is often neglected, recent literature, mostly of pragmatist signature, points to imagination as one of its central elements. In this article we develop some of their arguments by looking at the moral role of imagination in practice, in particular the practice of neonatal intensive care. Drawing on empirical research, we analyze a decision-making process in various stages: delivery, staff meeting, and reflection afterwards. We show how imagination aids medical practitioners demarcating moral categories, tuning their actions, and exploring long-range consequences of decisions. We argue that imagination helps to bring about at least four kinds of integration in the moral decision-making process: personal integration by creating a moral self-image in moments of reflection; social integration by aiding the conciliation of the diverging perspectives of the people involved; temporal integration by facilitating the parties to transcend the present moment and connect past, present, and future; and epistemological integration by helping to combine the various forms of knowledge and experience needed to make moral decisions. Furthermore, we argue that the role of imagination in these moral decision-processes is limited in several significant ways. Rather than being a solution itself, it is merely an aid and cannot replace the decision itself. Finally, there are also limits to the practical relevance of this theoretical reflection. In the end, it is up to care professionals as reflective practitioners to re-imagine the practice of intensive care and make the right decisions with hope and imagination.

Ethics and Nanopharmacy: Value Sensitive Design of New Drugs

Although applications are being developed and have reached the market, nanopharmacy to date is generally still conceived as an emerging technology. Its concept is ill-defined. Nanopharmacy can also be construed as a converging technology, which combines features of multiple technologies, ranging from nanotechnology to medicine and ICT. It is still debated whether its features give rise to new ethical issues or that issues associated with nanopharma are merely an extension of existing issues in the underlying fields. We argue here that, regardless of the alleged newness of the ethical issues involved, developments occasioned by technological advances affect the roles played by stakeholders in the field of nanopharmacy to such an extent that this calls for a different approach to responsible innovation in this field. Specific features associated with nanopharmacy itself and features introduced to the associated converging technologies- bring about a shift in the roles of stakeholders that call for a different approach to responsibility. We suggest that Value Sensitive Design is a suitable framework to involve stakeholders in addressing moral issues responsibly at an early stage of development of new nanopharmaceuticals.     

Refining Value Sensitive Design: A (Capability-Based) Procedural Ethics Approach to Technological Design for Well-Being

Science and Engineering Ethics - Fundamental questions in value sensitive design include whether and how high-tech products/artefacts could embody values and ethical ideals, and how plural and...     

新公共服务理论的道德价值谱系

21世纪初,公共行政理论呈现出了多元发展趋势,以"人本主义"、"责任中心主义"为价值内核的新公共服务理论对以"管理主义"、"效率至上主义"为主导理念的新公共管理范式的批判与取代,反映出现代行政不断走出传统技术理性主义的羁绊,呈现不断趋向现代公民社会基本价值与要求的大方向,为公共行政发展回归价值正道做了恰当的理论铺陈,也为现代性行政建构开辟了一条有重要指向性的实践理路.     

Radical Moral Imagination: Courage,Hope, and Articulation

This paper develops the basis for a new account of radical moral imagination, understood as the transformation of moral understandings through creative response to the sensed inadequacy of one's moral concepts or morally significant appraisals of lived experience. Against Miranda Fricker, I argue that this kind of transition from moral perplexity to increased moral insight is not primarily a matter of the “top‐down” use of concepts. Against Susan Babbitt, I argue that it is not primarily a matter of “bottom‐up” intuitive responsiveness to experience. Beyond courage and hope, radical moral imagination involves the articulation of inchoate experience, which allows individuals to make new kinds of moral moves and to lay claim to others' acknowledgment of the meaning of these moves.     

Imaginative Faith: Apocalyptic,Science Fiction Theory,and Theology

Abstract : Both pastors and academic theologians have struggled with the place of apocalyptic language and imagery within the modern worldview. Many have dismissed apocalyptic as escapist and have alleged that it is divorced from the political and social concerns at the heart of contemporary theology and practice. Yet, contemporary critical theorists have overcome similar suspicions about science‐fiction and now embrace it as a unique vehicle for thinking about the ills and the promise of contemporary culture. This essay suggests that within contemporary critical theory one finds useful tools for reading and using apocalyptic language and imagery as a means for engaging a world threatened by sin and violence.     

植入性心脏转复除颤器安全设计的伦理审视——价值敏感设计方法论应用研究

植入性医疗设备安全技术有了长足发展,但仍存在技术设计与患者价值需求相矛盾,技术上可行的设备往往不为患者所接受等问题.植入性医疗设备的安全设计既应具备理想的技术性能,也应充分考虑患者的价值诉求.价值敏感设计是一种关于技术设计的理论方法,对患者的价值观和伦理道德心理诉求予以关注,为以植入型心脏转复除颤器为代表的植入性医疗设备的安全性设计提供方法指导和建议,对我国植入性心脏转复除颤器的设计和应用具有重要的借鉴意义.     

儒家德育课程思想对现代思想道德教育的价值

探讨儒家德育课程思想,不仅可以使我们充分认识儒家思想的精华和糟粕,而且可以使我们从中探求其之所以长期占据我国传统思想文化统治地位的原因,寻求其中所蕴含的深刻的民族文化心理,对我国当前思想道德教育提供有益的借鉴和启示。     

Emotional Engineers: Toward Morally Responsible Design

Engineers are normally seen as the archetype of people who make decisions in a rational and quantitative way. However, technological design is not value neutral. The way a technology is designed determines its possibilities, which can, for better or for worse, have consequences for human wellbeing. This leads various scholars to the claim that engineers should explicitly take into account ethical considerations. They are at the cradle of new technological developments and can thereby influence the possible risks and benefits more directly than anybody else. I have argued elsewhere that emotions are an indispensable source of ethical insight into ethical aspects of risk. In this paper I will argue that this means that engineers should also include emotional reflection into their work. This requires a new understanding of the competencies of engineers: they should not be unemotional calculators; quite the opposite, they should work to cultivate their moral emotions and sensitivity, in order to be engaged in morally responsible engineering.     

Moral Responses and Moral Theory: Socially-based Externalist Ethics

The paper outlines a view called social (or two-level) response-dependency as an addition to standard alternatives in metaethics that allows for a position intermediate between standard versions of internalism and externalism on the question of motivational force. Instead of taking psychological responses as either directly supplying the content of ethics (as on emotivist or sentimentalist accounts) or as irrelevant to its content (as in classical versions of Kantian or utilitarian ethics), the view allows them an indirect role, as motivational props to moral teaching and thus to the general institution of moral discourse. However, they are not implied by any particular moral judgment (or speaker), so that amoralism comes out as possible. The response that defines the distinctively moral notion of wrong on this account is the second-level (social) response of forbidding some behavior; but this is ultimately to be understood in terms of (variable) individual reactions. Natural human emotion tendencies thereby constrain the content of ethics, while allowing for some degree of social variation in moral codes.     

道德理论的新进展--道德判断的社会直觉模式

道德判断的研究一直遵循皮亚杰和柯尔伯格的理性主义模式．但随着人们对认知双重过程论的逐渐认可,传统的道德判断理论受到了挑战。本文介绍了道德判断的一种新的理论模式——道德判断的社会直觉模式。该理论认为,道德判断是由迅速、自动的评价(直觉)所导致。     

先秦儒家的道德自觉论及其现代价值

儒家思想被称为“为己之学”,旨在引导人自尽其心而涵厚其德,内蕴丰厚的道德自觉思想。在先秦儒家看来,个体道德自觉源自人之本性,生成于与他人、社会、自然等相处的各种关系场域中,受“君子”“贤人”“圣人”等理想人格范型的指引,遵循从“为人由己”的道德自我觉醒、“推己及人”的道德关系圆融到“内圣外王”的道德境界升华这一逻辑展开。先秦儒家的道德自觉论在历史赓续中形成深厚的历史文化根基和坚实的民族认同基础,深刻影响着民众的思想意识、价值取向和生活方式,有利于强化人民的主体作用、重塑社会伦理秩序和增强文化自信,对当前促进公民道德建设、推进国家治理体系和治理能力现代化以及提升国家文化软实力具有深远意义。     

Using What Premarital Couples Already Know to Inform Marriage Education: Integration of a Gottman Model Perspective

The Marriage Preparation and Preservation Act of Florida stimulated a study of premarital couples. What are the best things that you do in your relationship was asked in a survey of persons seeking marriage licenses. The sample consisted of 962 participants. Responses were examined using Gottman's Sound Marital House (1999) as a theoretical framework. Results indicate that premarital participants view specific aspects of the Sound Marital House as the best things they contribute to their relationship. Responses can be used as a guide to the development of a Gottman-based marriage preparation curriculum.